Dumbest. Anti-Terror Tech. Ever?

When historians look back at the first few years of the post-9/11 era, they’ll likely recognize it as a Silver Age of military technology hucksterism. From Rube Goldberg lightning guns to algorithms that allegedly found jihadists by their pizza orders, Washington gorged itself in an all-you-can-eat buffet of half-baked terror-fighters.

But even in this smorgasbord of silliness, one project stands out as a signature dish, Aram Roston reports for Playboy: a con man’s claim that he could find hidden in Al Jazeera broadcasts “secret bar codes” from Osama Bin Laden’s minions, telling “terrorists the terms of their next mission, laying out the latitudes and longitudes of targets, sometimes even flight numbers and dates.”

…[W]hen some experienced officers heard about it, they couldn’t believe it. One former counterterrorism official remembers the briefing… “I was saying, ‘This is crazy. This is embarrassing…'” Another former officer, who has decades of experience, says, “We were told that, like magic, these guys were able to exploit this Al Jazeera stuff and come up with bar codes, and these bar codes translated to numbers and letters that gave them target locations. I thought it was total bullshit…”

[Nevertheless,] over the years Montgomery’s intelligence found its way to the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, Special Forces Command, the Navy, the Air Force, the Senate Intelligence Committee and even to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office…

What are some of the other ridiculously lame terror-fighting “technologies” of the past decade? Drop us a line or sound off in the comments.